A Formal Treatment of Contract Signature

The article develops a logical understanding of processes for signature of legal contracts, motivated by applications to legal recognition of smart contracts on blockchain platforms. A number of axioms and rules of inference are developed that can be used to justify a “meeting of the minds” precondition for contract formation from the fact that certain content has been signed. In addition to an “offer and acceptance” process, the article considers “signature in counterparts”, a legal process that permits a contract between two or more parties to be brought into force by having the parties independently (possibly, remotely) sign different copies of the contract, rather than placing their signatures on a common copy at a physical meeting. It is argued that a satisfactory account of signature in counterparts benefits from a logic with syntactic self-reference. The axioms used are supported by a formal semantics, and a number of further properties of the logic are investigated. In particular, it is shown that the logic implies that when a contract has been signed, the parties do not just agree, but are in
mutual agreement
(a common-knowledge-like notion) about the terms of the contract.